“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
-– B. Lester

When examining history, it seems that a narrative has evolved over time that slavery somehow just happened in the United States due to the need for cheap labor and that Africans were chosen because they could do that labor the best. While this is true, it is far from the full reality of the situation. Like slavery, race took time to be created and accepted by the population and like slavery; race had to be created from a legal framework. For this, we need look no further than colonial Virginia.

It must be acknowledged that there was and still is some debate over whether or not the Africans that came to Virginia in 1619 were slaves or that they slowly, but surely transitioned to slavery. Yet, despite this, there is still evidence that in the mid-1600s, laws were being made to create race.

Interestingly enough, slavery was not originally sought after in colonial Virginia as, “in spite of its seeming superiority, [it] was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor during the first half of the century” [1] due to the high morality of Virginia immigrants. Such morality created a situation where there would be no advantage in owning a person for their entire lives rather than a few years, “especially since a slave cost roughly twice as much as an indentured servant.” [2]

Though, this ‘morality’ was in reality due to economics as up until the 1640s, the main crop for Barbados and Virginia was tobacco. However, Barbados made a switch to cotton and then finally sugar in the early 1640s. This discouraged white indentured servants from going to Barbados as “sugar production required such strenuous labor that men would not willingly undertake it.” [3] Thus, colonial Virginia was given an influx of indentured servants. ...

NEW YORK – Police in an East Texas city will no longer enrich their coffers by seizing assets from innocent Black and Latino drivers and threatening them with baseless criminal charges, under a settlement reached today with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU settled a class-action suit, pending court approval, against officials in Tenaha and Shelby County, where it is estimated police seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008 in at least 140 cases. Police officers routinely pulled over motorists in the vicinity of Tenaha without any legal justification, asked if they were carrying cash and, if they were, ordered them to sign over the cash to the city or face charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

Almost all of the stops involved Black and Latino drivers. None of the plaintiffs in the case were ever arrested or charged with a crime. The seized assets were used to enrich the defendants’ offices and themselves.

“This was a brazen case of highway robbery, plain and simple,” said Elora Mukherjee, a staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Law enforcement needs to focus on protecting the communities they serve, not on policing for profit. ...

in Massive Nationwide Request
Information Sought on How Cameras are Used by Police Agencies and How Data is Stored

From: American Civil LibertiesUnion, aclu.org

NEW YORK –American Civil LibertiesUnion affiliates in 38 states sent requests today to local police departments and state agencies that demand information on how they use automatic license plate readers (ALPR) to track and record Americans’ movements.

In addition, the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts filed federal Freedom of Information Act requests with the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Transportation to learn how the federal government funds ALPR expansion nationwide and uses the technology itself.

ALPRs are cameras mounted on patrol cars or on stationary objects along roads – such as telephone poles or the underside of bridges – that snap a photograph of every license plate that enters their fields of view. Typically, each photo is time, date, and GPS-stamped, stored, and sent to a database, which provides an alert to a patrol officer whenever a match or “hit” appears. ...

The Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Independence will be held in the House Chamber of the Vermont State House on September 14th. It will begin at 9:00 a.m. and conclude at 4:00 p.m.

Keynote speakers will be Morris Berman, author of the provocative book about the demise of the American Empire entitled Why America Failed, and Lierre Keith, co-author of the equally radical Deep Green Resistance, which unabashedly calls for the end of civilization in its present destructive form. The convention will also include a series of short presentations on agricultural, energy, economic, and political independence.

A new method for producing multiple-perspective 3-D images could prove more practical in the short term than holography.

Written by: Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term. ...

Wow! Not only did Alienlove.com pass the 10 million mark in September for total hits, in October we broke a five year record for number of hits in a month! November has already surpassed October and 2011 is our best year yet! Thank you! For seven years now, I've been posting stories, offering an alternative to mainstream media which rarely represents anything but the 1% view, as local news outlets, and radio and television stations are increasingly bought up, becoming mega-conglomerates.

We have never asked for donations, however, there are costs associated with maintaining the site and of course it requires an unending commitment of time, day after day, week after week, year after year. We are still not asking for donations, but it would be extremely helpful to us and no cost to you if you would do your Amazon shopping through an alienlove.com advertising link. (Links can be found at the top of the home page and in the left and right columns, just click one and do your shopping.) ...

Other News: Segregation Still Strong 150 Years after the Civil War Began

Maybe racial discrimination will truly fade someday, but don't count on it for now.

By William A. Collins

Good old Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi. He helps keep life in perspective. When he defended Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell's infamous recollection of the Confederacy that somehow failed to mention slavery, Barbour called the issue a "nit" — merely an insignificant matter.

But while Barbour's dismissive view of slavery may be popular in Mississippi — he's the governor, after all — it's nonetheless a little raw for most of the country. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, America's entrenched segregation is more refined, but no less real. We accomplish racial separation simply through zoning regulations and law enforcement. Zoning keeps poor people, especially when they're not white, out of middle-class and wealthy towns by concentrating them in jurisdictions laden with cramped housing and under-funded schools.

This technique accomplishes two things. First it assures that poor minorities won't live in affluent white neighborhoods. Second, since lower property values mean less property tax revenue to fund public schools, the kids raised in those homes aren't as likely to get a good education. That in turn means that when they're adults, their own kids will probably live in areas with under-funded schools too. ...

A fundamentally new approach to glasses-free 3-D displays could save power, widen the viewing angle and make 3-D illusions more realistic.

Nintendo’s 3DS portable gaming system, the first commercial device with a glasses-free 3-D screen, has been available in the United States for barely a month, and it’s already sold more than a million units. Its three-hour battery life, however, is less than half that of its predecessor, the 2-D DS device.

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have developed a fundamentally new approach to glasses-free 3-D, called HR3D, which they say could double the battery life of devices like the 3DS without compromising screen brightness or resolution. Among other advantages, the technique could also expand the viewing angle of a 3-D screen, making it practical for larger devices with multiple users, and it would maintain the 3-D effect even when the screen is rotated — something that happens routinely with handheld devices.

According to Doug Lanman, a postdoc in Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar’s Camera Culture Group at the Media Lab, the 3DS relies on a century-old technology known as a parallax barrier. Like most 3-D technologies, this one requires two versions of the same image, one tailored to the left eye and one to the right. The two images are sliced into vertical segments and interleaved on a single surface. ...

Other News: Smithsonian and MIT Partner to Turn Kids into Scientific Investigators

From: The Newsroom of the Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution and MIT announced the April 4 launch of VANISHED, an 8-week online/offline environmental disaster mystery game for middle-school children, meant to inspire engagement and problem solving through science.

Developed and curated by MIT’s Education Arcade and the Smithsonian, VANISHED is a first-of-its-kind experience where participants become investigators racing to solve puzzles and other online challenges, visit museums and collect samples from their neighborhoods to help unlock the secrets of the game. Players can only discover the truth about the environmental disaster by using real scientific methods and knowledge to unravel the game’s secrets.

To navigate through the mystery game’s challenges, participants will meet Smithsonian scientists from such diverse disciplines as paleobiology, volcanology, forensic anthropology and entomology, as well as collaborate with MIT students. Potential participants can sign-up for VANISHED at vanished.mit.edu beginning March 21.

“Current science instruction relies too heavily on memorization and activities with predetermined outcomes causing many kids to lose interest in science and have misconceptions about what it means to be a scientist,” said Scot Osterweil of MIT Education Arcade. “VANISHED will provide kids with real scientific mysteries to solve. The popularity of television shows like CSI, Bones, and NCIS tells us there is hunger for this kind of problem solving. ...

Horror films are more than popular. Those who like to feel the rush of adrenaline in their blood are especially fond of horror films that are allegedly based on real events. Communicating with the dead has been one of the most popular horror themes for decades. There is a separate branch in the theme – when a film character communicates with ghosts via radio signals. The phenomenon has a scientific name – the electric voice phenomenon (EVP).

There are plenty of online resources dedicated to this phenomenon. The most distinctive movie of the genre, White Noise, describes a miserable widower who traces radio interferences day and night and discovers messages from the other world once in a while.

Many scientists tried to establish a connection with the other world using various technical devices. In 1920, Thomas Edison put forward an idea that our ego, transferring to the other world, had to preserve its ability to affect matter even from there. If this is the case, then sensitive equipment would be able to register these effects, it just has to be invented. This original idea was used as the epigraph for White Noise. ...

Approximately 10 years ago, children began to disappear from an amusement park of the British town of Kent. The kids would enter the hall of mirrors and never came out.

The local police ran off their legs. Recently, a psychic lady announced that she knew where the kids were. According to her, there was a door to the other world behind one of the mirrors in the amusement park.

We live in a 3-D space where everything is measured by height, width and length, and we are only capable of thinking within these limits. We know that one dimension is an endless straight line. We can easily imagine two dimensions – a subspace, or plain surface, and we can see three usual dimensions around. Yet, even academic science acknowledges that there are more dimensions out there.

There is the so-called “string theory” popular in contemporary physics. It is very difficult to understand, but it admits the existence of other dimensions.

“There can be up to 26 dimensions, but they are sort of folded, so we cannot see them. We have not managed to find them through experiments either,” explained Aleksey Basilevich, Doctor of Physics.

Generally, an average person spends five years of their life on a toilet.

The World Toilet Organization (WTO) was founded in 2001 at a conference for toilet professionals held in Singapore. Currently the organization has 200 members, including Russia. At the same conference the World Toilet Organization declared its professional holiday, the World Toilet Day, which was celebrated on November 19.

The recently created international organization has plenty to do. Like any other industry, toilet industry is not without extremes. On the one hand, WTO compiles international ratings of public toilets marking them with stars, like hotels. For example, Singapore and China already boast 5-star toilets. On the other hand, some 42 percent of the world population does not have an opportunity to relieve themselves in specially designated areas and do it wherever they can. One of the most challenging issues in all countries is elimination of notorious lines in women’s restrooms. World history of toilets proves that all peoples independently of each other came across the same issues and found similar solutions.

* Toilets estimated to be approximately 5,000 years old were found on Orkney Islands near the Northern shore of Scotland. There were drain gutters installed under clay toilets. ...

One of Moscow law enforcement agencies discovered an underground laboratory where harmful leeches were grown. According to Yevgeny Gildeev, head of the Information and PR division of the regional Department of Internal Affairs, the leeches were brought from abroad and sold as medicinal ones.

The leech empire was destroyed in Lyubertsy - a town in the Moscow region. The owner of the lab was growing leeches in inhumane conditions, and even the personnel of the “factory” suffered from the brutalized creatures. Harmful leeches were sold both to residents of Moscow and the Moscow region.

When police broke into the lab, they found approximately 4,000 leeches. Only a part of them were kept in containers, and the rest were crawling on the floor, walls, and ceiling. They were everywhere, including the office adjacent to the lab, and an aquarium. ...

A real tragedy is happening on the shores of the Black Sea. Dolphins throw themselves out onto the shore almost every day. Local residents are convinced that a horrible ecological conditions of the sea is the reason. However, scientists from a Crimean laboratory in Brem who have been monitoring the situation for nearly 20 years explain that the brains of suicidal dolphins are infected with morbillivirus infection. The infection causes them to lose [spatial] orientation and strength. We know very little about the animal world.

Myth 1. Mice love cheese

Rodents will not turn down a piece of cheese but if they had a choice, they would always choose food high in sugar, like chocolate. This was proven by scientists from a Massachusetts University.

Myth 2. Rattle snakes make a cracking sound before an attack.

A hissing or a cracking sound is a warning signal a snake gives to an animal or a human. It means that the snake is very close and may not have enough time to escape. If the snake attacks, it does it in silence.

Deep questions confront humanity these days. Such as, what to do about that Israeli/Palestinian conflagration? Or this one: What is a Pringle, really?

For those of you who fret over the big things, I bring you glad tidings. The Supreme Court of England has at last resolved this last question. A Pringle, ruled Lord Justice Robin Jacob, is a potato chip.

You might think this is obvious, since these edibles feature an illustration of chips on the package and are marketed as "potato chips."

Okay, they're a deconstructed, reconstituted, over-engineered potato product, but still, there it is: a potato chip.

However, some in England disagree, vigorously protesting that Pringles also contain corn, rice, wheat, and assorted additives. These complainers were not nitpicking consumers, but lawyers from Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of said product! ...